"WILLIAMSTOWN, Australia -- The whale conservation group Sea Shepherd is celebrating victory as Japan ends its whaling season with less than a third of its annual self-assigned quota."

"'It has been a successful campaign,' Sea Shepherd founding president Captain Paul Watson said Friday. 'There are hundreds of whales swimming free in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary that would now be dead if we had not been down there for the last three months. That makes us very happy indeed.'

The Japanese Fisheries Agency said Friday that the whaling fleet is homeward bound from the Southern Ocean 'on schedule' with 266 minke whales and one fin whale. By comparison, the agency set a quota of 900 whales when the Japanese whalers began their 'research' whaling in December 2011."